Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli departs the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Latest York, August 3, 2017 within the Brooklyn borough of Latest York City.
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Notorious “Pharma bro” fraudster Martin Shkreli was released from a federal prison in Pennsylvania on Wednesday and right into a U.S. Bureau of Prisons halfway house at an undisclosed location in Latest York to finish the remainder of his criminal sentence, his lawyer said.
In a throwback to the times when Shkreli was probably the most outstanding trolls on Twitter, a friend of his tweeted a photograph of them together smiling in a automotive after his release, with the caption: “Picked up this guy hitchhiking. Says he’s famous.”
His friend was wearing a t-shirt featuring a photograph of Shkreli smirking during testimony before Congress, with the words, “Free Shkreli” underneath it.
“Getting out of real prison is less complicated than getting out of Twitter prison,” Shkreli wrote on his Facebook page Wednesday, referring to his ban from Twitter, which dates to his harassment of a female journalist in 2017.
Shkreli, a 39-year-old Latest York City resident who was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, previously was attributable to be released from the Allenwood low-security federal correctional institution on Sept. 14.
Shkreli was sentenced to 7 years in prison in March 2018. His release barely greater than 4 years after that sentencing reflects the credit he received for good behavior in prison, and for completing education and rehabilitation programs while locked up.
It also reflects the proven fact that Shkreli already had spent nearly six months in jail before he was sentenced. A federal judge revoked his release bond in September 2017, two months after his conviction, after he offered Facebook followers a $5,000 bounty for samples of Hillary Clinton’s hair.
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Shkreli’s lawyer Benjamin Brafman, in a press release Wednesday, said, “I’m pleased to report that Martin Shkreli has been released from Allenwood prison and transferred to a BOP halfway house after completing all programs that allowed his prison sentence to be shortened.”
“While within the halfway house I even have encouraged Mr. Shkreli to make no further statement, nor will he or I even have any additional comments presently,” Brafman said.
A Bureau of Prisons spokesman said Shkreli was transferred to community confinement overseen by the agency’s Residential Reentry Management Office.
“Community confinement means the inmate is in either home confinement or a Residential Reentry Center (RRC, or halfway house),” the spokesman said in a press release. “Mr. Shkreli’s projected release date from the custody of the BOP is September 14, 2022. For safety and security reasons, we don’t discuss any individual inmate’s conditions of confinement to incorporate transfers or release plans.”
Shkreli gained national infamy in 2015 when his second pharmaceuticals company Vyera summarily raised the value of the lifesaving drug Daraprim by greater than 4,000% overnight.
Shkreli earned the sobriquet “Pharma bro” for smugly defending that price increase, for insulting people on Twitter who called out his behavior, and for his purchase of a one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album for $2 million.
But his criminal conviction is unrelated to the value increase of that anti-parasite medication.
Shkreli was arrested in late 2015 on charges that accused him of defrauding investors at two hedge funds to found his first drug company, Retrophin. He also was charged with looting Retrophin to pay back investors at his hedge funds for losses that he had covered up.
He was convicted at trial in July 2017 in Brooklyn federal court of several charges within the case.
In January, a federal judge banned Shkreli for all times from the pharmaceutical industry and ordered him to pay nearly $25 million in civil penalties for engaging in anticompetitive conduct to guard Vyera’s profits earned from Daraprim.
Vyera paid $40 million to plaintiffs in that very same case, which included the Federal Trade Commission and 7 states, amongst them Latest York and California.
